How to get all vessels via API?

Richel Panopio

Using the LSEG Data Library for Python package, I created this function that gets all vessels in the API.

Note that VESSEL_VARS contains a list of vessel codes assigned in the LSEG platform (e.g., "F:2I": Bulkers, "F:2J": Dry Bulk, etc.)

Running this function returns only around 50,000 vessel IMOs.

I would like to ask whether this is already all the available vessel IMOs obtainable via the API. If not, how can I obtain all vessel IMOs (perhaps I'm missing other vessel_codes)?

Thank you!

Jirapongse Phuriphanvichai

@Richel Panopio

Thank you for reaching out to us.

I checked and found that there are 425,551 entries in the VesselPhysicalAssets view. The number of entries that have IMO is 220,848.

Each search request limits the number of returned entries in a response to 10,000 entries. This means that it will use at least 23 requests to get all entries. In addition, the API is designed to search for entries, not requesting all entries.

However, to retrieve all entries, we need to adjust the filter expression to ensure that the number of entries returned in each response does not exceed 10,000.

I found one solution that uses the PermID with the startswith and IMO expression "startswith(PermID,'{perm_query}') and IMO ne null". The code looks like this:

import pandas as pd
import lseg.data as ld
from lseg.data.content import search

ld.open_session()

perm_list = [
    '773094', '773095', '773096', '773097', '773098',
    '773099', '773100', '773101', '773102', '773103'
]

LIMIT = 10000
TOP = 1
df_list = []

def get_total(perm_query):
    response = search.Definition(
        view=search.Views.VESSEL_PHYSICAL_ASSETS,
        filter=f"startswith(PermID,'{perm_query}') and IMO ne null",
        select = "IMO",
        top=TOP
    ).get_data()

    count = response.data.raw['Total']

    print(f"{perm_query}: {count}")

    # If the result exceeds the limit, split it into
    # another 10 prefixes: 0-9
    if count > LIMIT:
        total = 0

        for i in range(10):
            total += get_total(perm_query + str(i))

        return total

    elif count > 0:
        df_list.append(response.data.df)

    return count


total = 0

for perm_id in perm_list:
    for i in range(10):
        perm_query = perm_id + str(i)
        total += get_total(perm_query)

print(f"Total: {total}")

pd.concat(df_list)

It uses 100 requests. You need to change the TOP variable to 10,000 to get all entries and use the Select parameter to get all required fields.

FYI: This is a sample code that has not been fully tested. Please ensure that it is thoroughly tested and validated before deploying it to a production environment.